The Armee De L’Air

CCXCII

On Armistice Day, November 11, 1918, the French Aéronautique Militaire had some 3,222 front-line combat aircraft in Europe alone, making it the world's largest air force. When the Great War ended the French government was in the process of expanding the air force to 300 squadrons, more than enough to defend France’s far-flung colonial empire in Africa and Asia, and to overpower the Germans in Europe.

The end of the war brought plans for this massive expansion to a halt. France nevertheless maintained its huge air armada and continued to order up new aircraft, though in far fewer numbers than once anticipated. 

French aircraft production was in the hands of dozens of small companies, the most famous of which were Latécoère, Morane-Saulnier, Nieuport-Delage and Amiot, each only producing small numbers of aircraft. Due to their limited production capacity and fractionalized production budgets, by 1936 French aircraft production was absurdly behind schedule. The government’s 1936 nationalization of the aircraft industry into six larger companies did little to increase production since much energy was expended in the consolidation itself.  

And despite the vast number of French aircraft most were of World War I vintage. Even the newer aircraft were generally built as biplanes or strut-and-wire monoplanes. None had the sleekness of the British Spitfire or the later German Focke-Wulf 190.  Even the most modern French all-metal monoplane fighters had open cockpits in 1939. 

Over in the U.K. Hugh Dowding predicted that the French air force would be all but destroyed on the ground if it had to face modern German fighters and bombers. He was deeply critical of the primitive strategy and tactics with which the French planned to conduct any coming air war --- essentially random combat air patrols which might (or might not) intercept German fighters and bombers at any given time. 

Dowding argued to his fellow members of the Air Council that Britain simply couldn’t spare the resources to follow the French example. There was a shortage of fuel, a dearth of pilots, and limited numbers of planes.*

Instead, Dowding argued for a centralized command center where all the data from all the Chain Home and Chain Home Low stations could be compiled, quickly evaluated, and where coordinated steps could be taken to go to battle with enemy aircraft. 

One of the most important elements in this system was one of the most mundane: Stuffy fought the General Post Office (GPO), which controlled not only the mails but the telegraph and telephone lines, tooth and nail to  have all the telephone lines from the CH and CHL stations, the airbases, and the scores upon scores of observer stations installed underground where they could not be knocked out in the event of enemy attack. It was an immense undertaking, irritating to even members of the British Cabinet, and it may have well been one of the least-lauded but most crucial arguments that Hugh Dowding ever won in his life.

Dowding’s Chain Home radar system had its limitations --- it could detect groupings of inbound enemy planes and provide their general direction, but the number of planes and their types still had to be determined by ground-based observers. In order to provide this data, the Royal Observer Corps, a civilian paramilitary founded in 1925, was reorganized into 40 “centres”  (exchanges) controlling more than 1500 observer posts. Observers were trained to identify aircraft, plot their trajectories (note the numbers around the perimeter of the post) and telephone in the information. In general, ROC posts gave the RAF 25 minutes of lead time to scramble to the proper quadrant in order to engage the enemy

*Dowding’s bitter criticisms of the French air defense system were proven correct during the Battle of France in 1940. Roving French squadrons often ran out of fuel and had to disengage from combat with German adversaries or face almost certain death in dry tank forced crashes. Since there was no effective observation system on French ground German fighters could raid French airfields almost at will, destroying aircraft and infrastructure with little risk of loss. Even the (later) highly-effective Hawker Hurricanes that fought in the Battle of France were decimated. Stuffy was furious; the destruction and / or capture of the British aircraft only served to weaken his fighter squadrons at just about the time he was trying to bring them to maximum capacity.